"No two people see the external world in exactly the same way. To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is -- in other words, not a thing, but a think." - Penelope Fitzgerald

Oct 9, 2017

"Gerrymandering" Is Just A Polite Way Of Saying Election Fraud. Democrats Won't Even Call Corruption & Election Fraud What It Is... While The GOP Yells "Election Fraud" Even When There Is No Evidence Of It (Or Not Enough Evidence To Warrant Expenditure Of Tax Dollars On It)

A pretty clear proof that not calling things what they are out of a sense of politeness or derogatory high mindedness such as sarcasm (which is not a news thing but a comedian thing) is the reason for having a Nazi party like the GOP in so much power in our time.

CORRUPTION, AMERICAN-STYLE 11/15/2016 As the U.S. prepares for a potential African-style dictatorship under President-elect Trump, the developing world learns how to market government corruption like America.

Point:

"Lobbying" that we talk about on TV is a fancy way of saying"bribery". there is no moral reason to allow lobbying to continue as its briber. This is left out of the media while they try and act smart by talking about bribery like its normal and not a crime. They should be screaming about like a Fox News host but with facts rather than treasonous Nazi like lies. Gerymandering is, of course, just another way of saying "the election was rigged" or "election fraud". Another important fact people don't seem to realize about its creator, the GOP.AMERICAN HORRIBLE STORY - GERRYMANDERING 12/10/2013Jason Jones meets the Picasso of gerrymandering.

IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU CALL THIS "GERRYMANDERING" OR "RIGGING" ... IT'S STILL PLAIN, OLD FASHIONED, ELECTORAL FRAUD.

CHART from Mother Jones: Americans didn’t intend to elect a Republican majority to the House of Representatives. But thanks to GOP-engineered redistricting, they did.

Doing election fraud called "gerrymandering" (so as to talk down to the people?) basically means politicians don't have to answer to voters they don't like. The following is an extreme example of how this corruption tactic works...WHEN GERRYMANDERING GOES WRONG - NOVEMBER 19, 2015 - Hasan Minhaj investigates a district in Columbia, Mo., where a gerrymandering error leaves one lone voter to decide the fate of a questionable sales tax. (5:23)

While "left" won't call election fraud and political corruption what it is and instead use fancy words for them that most people won't get, at least on an emotional level, the GOP hit the people hard with emotional claims that are pure lies. The same words used with facts would be far more effective than without facts.From Politifact

“Election Fraud is rampant!! California has 11 Counties that have MORE VOTERS than registered voters!!” reads one of the most recent public commentssubmitted to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. “I have personally witnessed voter fraud in California,” reads another comment. An earlier comment claims that “many [voters] were deceased and many were not citizens.” Yet another post is from a former San Diego poll watcher who claims to have witnessed attempted voter fraud and was told by an elections official: “if someone wants to vote I am not about to stop them. This is America, not China!”

Over 500 comments were submitted online during the run-up to the second meeting of the commission on Tuesday, which was led by its vice-chair Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Many of those comments were in the same vein as those from the San Diego poll watcher, containing anecdotes or hearsay about egregious incidents of voter fraud or alleging massive levels of fraud on a national level. While those public comments weren’t directly addressed during the proceedings of the meeting, they did help set its tone, as Kobach and his fellow commissioners grappled with the gap between rhetoric on voter fraud—backed by ample anecdote—and data on in-person voter fraud, which are scant.

Several of the commissioners and invited guests used fuzzy or opaque data claims not just to further requests to study voter fraud, but to also push anti-voter-fraud legislation. Ken Block, the president of a software firm that used a consumer dataset to match the names and Social Security numbers of voters, claimed that his group was “able to identify with high confidence, several examples of voter fraud” and that “no government agency is looking for voter fraud.” *The accuracy of the latter statement aside—states certify elections results and check for double voters using much more complete datasets than his—Block never detailed the data collection methodology of his proprietary data, which a report shows come from Virtual DBS, a consumer data firm. ** If that dataset contains false duplicates or imputes the wrong Social Security number to two people with identical names, it would create duplicate voters for Block to pick up.

Block’s data was leaned on heavily by other commissioners, including the Heritage Foundation fellow and former elections official Hans von Spakovsky, a grizzled veteran of the quest for the grand voter conspiracy, who also pointed out several other unverified reports of double voting and noncitizen voting, including a group of about 300 people he’d flagged for registering to vote as noncitizens in Fairfax, Virginia, although no investigation materialized. Von Spakovsky expressed his conviction that there are “hundreds, if not thousands of voter-fraud cases that have yet to be investigated.”

During the meeting, even Kobach faced the wide chasm between his own claims of widespread voter-fraud and the evidence. On September 7, Kobach—who has launched hundreds of investigations of voter fraud in his own state and walked away with fewer than a dozen convictions—claimed in a column he wrote forBreitbart (where he is a paid contributor) that “facts have come to light that indicate that a pivotal, close election was likely changed through voter fraud on November 8, 2016: New Hampshire’s U.S. Senate Seat, and perhaps also New Hampshire’s four electoral college votes in the presidential election.” To Kobach, the source of that fraud was mostly thousands of out-of-staters who didn’t have updated driver’s licenses, and thus “never were bona fide residents of the State.”

Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon recently told the audience at a rally for theocratic loon Roy Moore, who just won the Republican primary for Jeff Sessions’ vacated Alabama Senate seat, that “they” — meaning the Republican establishment — “think you are a pack of morons.” Accusations of "elitism" against Republican leadership are the newest incarnation of a trademark conservative attack on Democratic politicians and liberal media commentators — all of whom, we are to assume, squeeze their nostrils together whenever they walk past an American without an Ivy League pedigree.

Besides the amplification of a sickly sense of self-pity, these increasingly common declarations of persecution have the disadvantage of being false. If the political establishment — especially mainstream Democrats — truly believed that voters like those at the Roy Moore rally were morons, they would win more elections.

Progressives lose at the ballot and across the culture because they consistently overestimate the intelligence and decency of the American people.

History’s greatest monster, otherwise known as Hillary Clinton, has presented a compelling relitigation of the 2016 election in her new book “What Happened,” arguing that James Comey’s violation of his professional standards, the overt chauvinism of Republican voters, the latent sexism of the mainstream media and the zealotry of the Bernie Sanders cult coalesced to form the circumstances perfect for her defeat.Critics of Clinton claim, many of them without reading the book, that she does not acknowledge her own devastating errors. She did not visit Wisconsin and Michigan, she did not forcefully articulate an economic program for national growth, and she relied too heavily on “identity politics” throughout her campaign appeals to voters.

Critics of Clinton claim, many of them without reading the book, that she does not acknowledge her own devastating errors. She did not visit Wisconsin and Michigan, she did not forcefully articulate an economic program for national growth, and she relied too heavily on “identity politics” throughout her campaign appeals to voters.

Her gravest misstep, which she does not concede and the media never mentions, was that she believed the majority of Americans were sufficiently thoughtful and moral to reject the prospect of a historically illiterate conman who routinely makes racist remarks and once boasted of committing sexual assault, acting as President of the United States.

She was wrong.

The Clinton campaign ran countless advertisements spotlighting the vulgarity and cruelty of Trump, thinking, “Americans will not vote for this monstrosity.” Nearly 63 million Americans did vote for it, seemingly more concerned about Clinton’s private email server than Trump’s willingness to use nuclear weapons or his unapologetic articulation of skepticism that a man of Mexican ancestry could fairly adjudicate a case.

Now, Trump is president, and he recently bellowed in Alabama — at a rally for Moore's primary opponent, Luther Strange, whom Moore has defeated — that the NFL should forbid players from kneeling during the national anthem. “Get that son of a bitch off the field,” Trump projectile vomited into the microphone.

The rhetoric of the current president is a far cry from “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent . . .” and “Ask not what your country can do for you . . .” It is, however, something that resonates with the American people.

According to the newest poll on the NFL imbroglio, 64 percent of Americans believe that the league should force its players to stand during the opening performance of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

One can almost hear the whimpers of progressives stressing the importance of “free speech.” The reality is that most Americans don’t know, and wouldn’t care if they did.

During the second presidential debate, Donald Trump chastised Hillary Clinton for not reforming the tax code when she was a Senator. The Democratic nominee explained how a bill becomes a law, giving the next president a free lesson in elementary civics. The exchange barely registered in the minds of the American people, most of whom are unaware of the legislative process themselves.

Thomas Jefferson, the founding father President Trump likened to Robert E. Lee with little public objection, once wrote, “knowledge is the currency of democracy.” America is bankrupt.

The liquidation resulting from decades of uninterrupted perversion of language and degradation of discourse affects not only the intellect, but also ethics. It is all but forgotten that Colin Kaepernick, who is currently unemployed, began the anthem protest to call attention to the continuation of police killings of unarmed black men, often without professional penalty, much less legal recrimination.

White Americans claim that they admire Martin Luther King Jr. and that they believe in the words, “All men are created equal,” but like Jefferson himself, they indicate that the truth is otherwise with their behavior. More anger is visible in reaction to players kneeling during a song than after video emerges of police officers executing innocent, black men. A large segment of whites, including the 50 percent who told pollsters that they will now boycott the NFL over the protests, demonstrate greater respect for “the flag” — a symbol of cheap cloth — than the lives of their fellow citizens with dark skin.Ignorance and the erasure of humanity are as American as football and flag waving. A recent experiment from The New York Times found that the more accurately Americans could identify North Korea on a map, the less likely they were to favor military action against the country. Harm de Blij, in his book “Why Geography Matters,” credits geographical knowledge as a bulwark against war and isolation. He also writes that “the American public is the most geographically illiterate society on the planet.”

In a 2015 Public Policy poll, 30 percent of Republicans and 19 percent of Democrats were in favor of bombing Agrabah. It has a vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding name, so clearly it is a threat to the survival of America. Lucky for our sake, it is the fictional setting of Disney’s “Aladdin,” an animated feature film for children.

While Trump ingratiated himself to the public with his condemnation of politically incorrect speech from professional athletes, and as he likely prepares to tweet threats against the Sultan of Agrabah, Puerto Rico is experiencing a humanitarian crisis of extreme suffering. More than three million people who live on the islands are currently struggling to meet basic needs. Estimates of how long they will suffer without power are grim.

Only 54 percent of Americans are aware that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. Ignorance of Puerto Rico’s commonwealth status with the United States is most important because of the heartless provincialism of many Americans. 81 percent of Americans who realize that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens support robust American aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Only 44 percent of Americans who do not know about Puerto Rican-U.S. citizenship support aid.

Progressives enjoy making appeals to the goodwill and generosity of Americans, and are consistently surprised when their arguments fail to resonate. They also counter the increasingly simple slogans of right wing politics with positions that require an extra step of thinking. On taxes, for example, Republicans will suggest that tax cuts help everyone. Democrats will counter that supply side economics disproportionately assist the rich, who are not in need of assistance, while reducing revenues available for important social programs. Many Americans will not make the extra step. The most powerful slogan, headline or catch phrase is all that matters.

Clinton used poor phrasing when she said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal mines out of business,” but her diagnosis of the future of a terminal industry was correct. Trump promised to “bring the jobs back.” Who won that argument?

Progressives will make political gains when they stop assuming that the majority of Americans operate according to rationality and compassion.

Edgar Allan Poe believed that all human beings are potential victims of, what he called in one of his most brilliant phrases, “the imp of the perverse.” Speaking of “ghastly and loathsome” images of human suffering, Poe refers to the human capacity of destruction, and the enjoyment people find in the perverse: “We perpetrate these actions merely because we feel that we should.”

Poe’s story begins with criticism of theologians, psychologists, and intellectuals for having too narrow, and faithful, an outlook on humanity. They have all denied or ignored the imp. The narrator then recalls his fascination with murder and “the brief, but pregnant sentences that consigned him to the hangman, and to hell.”

He speculated that he could get away with the most lethal of crimes and carried out his misdeed simply because he wanted.

Progressives are the theorists Poe eviscerates in the opening of his story, unwilling to confront the hideous truth. Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and their sinister friends whisper, “come on,” to the inner imp of the perverse.

An aggressive and self-entitled movement of millions of Americans are all ears

Quotes

"Make peace with the universe. Take joy in it. It will turn to gold. Resurrection will be now. Every moment, a new beauty." - Rumi

"God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that." - Joseph Campbell

"Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history." - Carl Jung

"Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society." - George Washington

“If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it's not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.” - Dalai Lama

“Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison. When the door is so wide open?” ― Rumi